1. Field of the Invention
This invention aims at the efficient synthesis of peptide chains. It involves a procedure and an apparatus that allows the execution of this procedure with convenience and expediency.
2. Prior Art
The numerous and cumbersome operations which are necessary during the multi-step synthesis of a peptide chain led to the development of solid-phase techniques (cfr. R. B. Merrifield, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 85, 2149 (1963) and R. L. Letsinger and M. J. Kornet, J. Amer. Chem. Soc. 85, 3045 (1963)) and to schemes that are based on soluble polymers (cfr. M. M. Shemyakin, Y. A. Ovchinnikov and A. A. Kiryushkin, Tetrahedron Lett. 1965, 2323). In these techniques, an amino acid (or peptide) is chemically attached to a polymeric support and acylation, the removal of blocking group, second acylation, etc., are carried out on the polymer-amino acid or polymer-peptide combination. The small molecular weight reactants and byproducts are easily separated from the large molecular weight product and therefore a facilitation of the operations and the automation of these operations becomes possible. On the other hand, the use of polymeric supports necessitates two steps that are often not simple enough: (a) the formation of a bond between the first constituent and the polymer, and (b) the cleavage of the bond between the completed peptide chain and the polymer. Furthermore, the synthetic procedures based on polymeric support suffer from several other disadvantages as well, such as decreased availability of analytical controls or the difficulty of purifying intermediates if this becomes necessary.